> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://mereorthodoxy.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Mobs and Friends: Encouraging a Culture of Reading in Our Churches - URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/mobs-and-friends-encouraging-a-culture-of-reading-in-our-churches/ - Published: 2026-11-02T12:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-02T12:00:00.000Z - Description: If the devices we spend so much of our lives absorbed in are shaping us to be angry, reactive, and combative, and if the communities that would help shape us in better ways are scarce, what can be done? - Author: Mere Orthodoxy - Tags: Jake Meador, Culture, Formation, Church The easiest group for most of us to belong to is a mob. Mobs do not require one to think. They do not require sacrifice. They do not require vulnerability. They do not require patiently tolerating another person, or seeking to understand the person. They simply require one to act—and to act in the same way that everyone else is acting. Most of that has always been true, of course. Mobs have always been with us. And the best amongst us have always feared them. But the technological tools available to us now make us uniquely vulnerable to these problems. And if you, like me, think that mob behavior is both dangerous to our neighbors and demeaning to the individual members of the mob, that should concern you. ## Mobs and Digital Technology Why are we more prone to mob behavior today? There are several reasons. First, digital technology makes it very easy to self-isolate. The public places we once gathered, which were weakened by the rise of television, have been further harmed by the rise of smartphones, video streaming, meal delivery apps, and much else besides. In many places it is harder, now, to find third places to gather with others—places neither residential nor commercial, but purely social. Additionally, as has been happening for decades now, voluntarily societies and group memberships of various sorts, including church attendance, are in decline. Our front porches are empty, our coffeeshops close early and the rotary clubs and bowling leagues are dwindling in numbers. In short, the groups we once belonged to outside of our home and our employer are harder for many to access, for a variety of reasons. At the same time that face-to-face community has become more complicated and challenging, online communities have arisen to fill that void. And so we now find many disembodied communities of a sort online–Facebook groups, group chats, communities gathered around podcasts or blogs, and so on. The profound limitation with these groups is that they are disembodied. What that means is these groups are not bound by the same rules and practices that embodied groups share. We cannot read each other's body language online, nor can we hear voice intonation or simply notice that a person looked especially stressed when they first walked in the room. All of that is invisible to us online. In fact, it's worse than that: It's not just that those non-verbal signs are invisible to us online. It's also that the kinds of responses we offer to those signs are discouraged online: You don't stand out in an online community by being patient, generous, or kind. You stand out online by being extreme, the most devoted, the most radical, etc. When we opt out of our in-person communities and turn more and more to online communities, we are being formed to being less thoughtful and more angry, less patient and more reactive, less generous and more combative. Most of us don't choose this for ourselves. What happens, rather, is that finding in-person community is difficult and so we turn to online versions as a last resort. But the formation that happens online happens regardless of what your original motivation was for turning to the internet to provide you with a community. And so over time all of us, if we aren't careful, find ourselves schooled in the habits and thoughts of the mob, rather than those proper to a human person committed to the love of neighbor. If you desire something better for yourself, then there is an obvious problem here: If the devices we spend so much of our lives absorbed in are shaping us to be angry, reactive, and combative, and if the communities that would help shape us in better ways are scarce, what can be done? ## Reading as a School of Friendship We started by talking about mobs. Let's now turn to friendship. Friendship as a form of community is almost entirely opposite to the mob. Mobs do not think or understand; they simply act. But in friendship we learn, through patient observation and conversation, to recognize another person, to understand them, even in some sense to think their thoughts after them. We learn to enjoy shared goods together, and to see the things that delight us in new ways precisely because our friend has taught us how. We sometimes say, "Oh, I wish so-and-so were here to see this," precisely because we know they would love whatever it is we're seeing. In friendship, we learn what it means to be human in a deeper way, what it means to share our life and our mind with another. I want to suggest that the reading of books gives us a way to practice a version of friendship, one that doesn't perfectly mimic in-person friendship, but that offers the best version of friendship one can find, apart from the possibility of a face-to-face conversation. There are many reasons for this. I'll briefly list three. First, a great deal of friendship is about attention. It's about attending to the thing you share with your friend that brought you together, delighting in whatever that thing is, be it a game, music, cooking, or something else. But it's also about attending to your friend directly—being aware of what other things they enjoy, what might be happening in their life, and so on. If you don't pay attention to anything, you will find it very hard to form and maintain friendships. Taking the time to closely read a book or even an essay, short story, or poem is a school for learning to pay attention. It is also a good school for learning to handle complexity without feeling anxious or threatened and to sit patiently as a story or argument builds. These are all qualities we need in order to grow and mature in our capacity for friendship. Second, the reading of books opens up the possibility of a form of friendship stretched over space or even time. When you read, you are encountering the ideas, thoughts, and stories of a person who almost certainly lives far from you. If you read enough of the person, they almost become a kind of mental companion to you—and you carry them about with you, even if they live far away. Not only that, but in some cases that person you first encounter in writing might one day become a friend. My own career began with a chance email sent to *Mere Orthodoxy* founder Matt Anderson in 2009 while I was still in college. I had read an essay of his and wanted to understand his argument better. On a whim, I sent him an email. He replied. 17 years later... here I am. But reading doesn't just open up friendships across space; it opens up friendships across time. It is not friendship in the truest sense, but certainly I feel as if some of the writers I know best have become friends of a sort to me, friends separated by time. Indeed, some of these friends are people I once knew in the flesh, but who have since gone to their rest. The friendship we once had face-to-face is now a friendship that exists across time, experienced by me through reading, not conversation. It will not always be so. But until that day when faith is sight and the dead rise incorruptible, I am grateful that reading allows me to reach across the years and meet new friends and renew old friendships. Lastly, friendships often develop around some third thing that the two friends enjoy together. We've hopefully all had the experience that C. S. Lewis wrote of so well when he spoke of how a friendship begins when we say, "you too? But I thought I was the only one..." It follows, then, that as we cultivate a love for more things, we develop a capacity to form new friendships, for there are more things that we love and which we might share with another. One of the easiest, cheapest, and best ways to cultivate new interests, loves, and affections is reading. Even earlier today, I took my boys to the public library and while they browsed the kids section, I scanned some of the other shelves and came across a book on the friendship between the US president Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that I'm looking forward to reading. And, who can say, perhaps in deepening my understanding of that friendship, I might find new friends of my own in the years to come. ## How might churches develop a culture of reading? The simplest way to develop culture is to simply begin doing the things you want to see normalized and practiced more broadly. So, begin by reading for yourself. But it needn't stop there. Churches can build their own libraries to be used by members and to help introduce their congregants to the devotional, biblical, and theological riches of the Christian tradition. They can also encourage starting reading groups, either to go through great devotional or theological classics of the faith or simply to read great novels, short stories, or poetry together. The key thing is that healthy reading cultures begin not with anxiety or antagonism, but with a sense of joy and delight over the world. Our world is cursed and, therefore, quite imperfect and frequently painful. And yet even so it is worth loving. And we can learn how and what to love in it better through the reading of books.